Thursday, July 5, 2012

Wrist Guards

The east coast experienced wide spread electrical outages after last Friday's storms. Some areas have yet to have power restored. The City of Bowie lost power for four days. On the first of July, the local ice rink was supposed to reopen after being shut since the beginning of May for annual maintenance, however reopening day has been delayed until the 7th of the month. In the meantime I've been waffling between various designs of wrist guards. I want actual protection when I return to the ice rather than the illusion of protection. After seeking comments on the skating forum and showing various print-outs from the internet to my orthopedic surgeon and physical therapist, I've put in an order with Snowboard Secrets for Flexmeter all season wrist guards.

Hopefully these will prevent me from immediately re-injuring my wrists and arms!

The flexmeter all season guards aren't cheap but they do come highly recommended by several skaters on the skating forum and pass muster with my surgeon and PT lady. Hopefully they won't be too bulky, but bulky is way better than another broken arm. I haven't received them yet but I should have them by the first part of next week. Stay tuned.

Hi Lori: Thanks for the support. It's good to have another endorsement on my choice of the flexmeter wrist guards. Yes, our power is back on (yippy!) but our little emergency gen set conked out before we got juice and so we had to heave out a fridge full of food anyway. But others had it worse and suffered longer--some as long as 8 or 9 days.

And yes, I've been following your posts about your trip over to Oberstdorf. Sounds like big fun!

With the wrist guards now received, I plan to see if I can still stand up in skates later this week. We shall see how much 4 months off the ice has taken away!

Just found this blog, very entertaining and informative. (BTW: I love small British sports cars and dingy sailing).

I took up figure skating last year just short of my 59th birthday and love it. I have been roller blading some for a number of years and always wear a helmet, hard shell knee pads and wrist guards. When I took ice skating I started out with soft knee pads and elbow pads and my wrist guards. After a few weeks I got cocky and stopped wearing the wrist guards. After a few falls, which fortunately did not injure anything, I went back to wearing my wrist guards. Now I feel "naked" without them.

Several months ago I was skiing and was speaking to a woman in her 50s about skiing and snowboarding. She had decide to try snowboarding with her grand kids and wore wrist guards, but took a fall and broke a wrist. Her orthodpedist told her the wrist guards may have contributed to the arm breaking so she stopped wearing them for skiing and gave up attempting to snowboard. My feeling is that she would have broken something in the fall anyway, likely in the wrist, and it is better to break a bone in the forearm rather than in the wrist.

dlbwtgski: Glad to hear that you find my blogs entertaining. The only time I don't wear my wrist guards is when I'm skating with my dance partner; the wrist guards make dance holds awkward. All other times I'm geared up. In my line of work (cellular and molecular biology) I can't afford another broken arm if I wish to remain employed!

Along with the flexmeter wrist guards I also wear D3O padded shorts and knee guards. When I advance to tricky back elements like back 3 turns I intend to add some form of head protection as well, at least until I become comfortable with those moves. I'm thinking about the Ribcap Fox: http://www.ribcap.ch/en/online-shop or perhaps one of the products from "ice halo" http://www.icehalo.ca/

As for the notion that wrist guards merely transfer the energy of a fall a little higher up the hog, that may well be true, but as you've noted, if you're going to break a bone, break a big one--they mend faster. I've fallen while wearing my flexmeters and the plastic palm inserts allow one to slide across the ice and dissipate the energy rather than concentrating it by coming to an abrupt stop. In that respect they may actually work better for figure skaters than the original target audience, snowboarders.

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About Me

I'm a 60-something year old goat (who's counting? I don't look a day over 70) who enjoys racing Classic and Vintage Moth Boats (a small development class of sailing dinghy), putzing with little British cars, riding bikes (both motor and pedal),figure skating and an occasional bimble.